When there is a conflict, poor communicators make it about the other person, using labels, rather than making it about the situation by indicating specific beha

When there is a conflict, poor communicators make it about the other person, using labels, rather than making it about the situation by indicating specific behaviour in a given moment. This is sadly very frequent and people are trained to expect things to be made personal. If someone is labelling you and saying "don't take things personally" you can asume ignorance rather than evilness, and try to explain the difference, between personal labels and pointing a given situational behaviour. It won't be over, because then the conflict will be about behaviours, and people have different expectations for those, what's ok and what it isn't. Culture is a collection of expected behaviours, this is how it finally clicked for me that actually defining a culture in a startup is important when you think about it. That's why hiring people you have worked with works so well, you don't expend time making expectations explicit.